The Loft is to the Smell (the downtown Los Angeles venue where No Age like to nest) as Whole Foods is to your lopsided vegetable garden out back. The Loft looks like Espresso Roma after an Ikea shopping spree on St. Patrick’s Day; the Smell looks like your hip little sister’s first art show. The Loft smells like Burger King and Pinesol; the Smell is the fucking smell. The Loft sounds like a live, tinkling stream of indie-pusses pissing ‘mdash; but not for long.
For old-fashioned scenesters ‘mdash; the type that would cut off an arm to have gotten trashed to Patti Smith at CBGB ‘mdash; the new wave of ruckusy, fun-loving Los Angeles punk emanating from the Smell is a modern-day miracle, its smalltime shoulder-to-shoulder standing space just what the digital age was mostly missing.
Indeed, the ex-supermercado lean-to is breeding the most inspired bunch of musical lifestylers on the Left Coast, and ‘mdash; all bias aside ‘mdash; pretty much puts L.A. one big cool-point above San Francisco.
But these punks are a cleaner mess than the spikey devil-worshippers of yore; they like white space, and poems, and the sun. When they say things, they’re not mean, and even semi-audible. If they want something, they ask for it. And in thanks, they ruffle your hair three-dimensionally like you’re just as cute.
Yeah, right.
One thing’s for sure: The phenomenon wouldn’t be half as happening without No Age. The multitasking duo was originally two-thirds of fellow Smell staple Wives, which is probably how they scored a house key by the second date, and in return ‘mdash; as word has it ‘mdash; guitar-half Randy Randall helped shovel a second sewage trench under the club to accommodate the basic needs of an exploding punk family. Even New Yorker granny Sasha Frere-Jones stopped by to take notes ‘mdash; and post pics on her blog (almost as weird as my mom joining Facebook).
Weirdo Rippers, No Age’s 2007 debut LP, was a half-hour, 11-track ‘greatest hits’ of all the EPs they had distributed on the come-up ‘mdash; more just a gathering of anything with a semi-recognizable tune sticking out from under their signature cloud of barbed-wire fuzzballs. (Plastered on the cover was a snapshot of the backdoor entrance to the Smell, album information painted straight onto the building’s white stucco.) Last year’s Nouns is fuller figured, with noise-pop melodies that lob past chicken scratch into the realm of laptop-speaker tolerable, meanwhile kicking up more cutting-room sawdust with which to clog the speakers than ever before ‘mdash; if only for some distant pleasure moan of their vegan-or-die tagalong mob. And this Saturday night in Price Center East, that could be you, Kid.
No Age will perform live at the Loft on April 11 at 8 p.m.